Inside Out didn’t open at number one at the box office in its debut weekend (despite leading on Friday), as Jurassic World surpassed it to take the top spot for a second straight week. But Pete Docter’s third film for Pixar earned perhaps a more important distinction: with an estimated $91 million, it’s the highest-grossing opening weekend for an original film—not a sequel or a film based on an existing property—ever. Considering it’s only the 41st-best opening weekend gross, that means the 40 best weekend performances ever are all sequels or films based on an existing idea. Despite that somewhat disheartening stat, it's an incredible achievement for Docter and Pixar; proof that there's still room for ingenuity in a landscape of money-printing nostalgia.
That success also brings with it a lingering question that's simple to pose but difficult to answer. Just as the release of Jurassic World inspired film critics to rank their Top 10 Steven Spielberg films, Inside Out prompted armchair AFI's everywhere to re-rank their Pixar films. And most of those lists tend to underrate one particular filmmaker. Of the core Pixar directors, those behind more than one film for the studio at this point—including John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, and hired-gun-turned-regular-contributor Brad Bird—is the best and most reliable of them actually Inside Out's Pete Docter?
We decided to dig in to find out for sure. For each of the four directors, we took the worldwide box office numbers for each of their Pixar projects, as well as the data from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.
Based on current numbers, the average Pixar film rakes in about $600 million worldwide at the box office. But as the data shows, purely on average box office performance, Docter is the only director with multiple credits at Pixar to beat that average. If Inside Out performs as well as Big Hero 6 did for Disney last fall ($652 million), that puts it squarely at the average of Docter’s two previous films, and given Inside Out just beat BH6’s opening weekend by $40 million---and has three whole summer weeks before Minions cuts into its business to draw the PG animated family film audience---that’s a reasonable goal to reach.
Box office receipts aren’t an indicator of a film’s artistic success, or even that a film resonated with audiences enough to be revered years down the line. But they are helpful in determining how reliable a director is at taking a $150 million budget and delivering a film that will earn back a significant return on investment. Pixar hasn’t had any problems making back budgets with any of its films, but Docter is still, empirically, the safest bet. And that’s unexpected at the least.
Granted, it's reductive to boil the nuances of a film review down to a numerical value. But with ultra-wide releases like Pixar movies, there are hundreds of reviews counted on sites on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic that give a comprehensive overview of how a film was received by U.S. critics.
And once again, Docter comes out on top. Lasseter has rare perfect 100% scores for the first two Toy Story films, but he’s also got the only "rotten" Pixar film ever (Cars 2) on his resume. Meanwhile, Docter just recorded a third straight film to earn stellar reviews. And for the first time, he broke through to the 90s on Metacritic, upping his average and increasing his lead. To be fair, we’re splitting hairs here—all four directors have ludicrously positive averages.
The one thing that sticks out here is that Docter has only directed three films, compared to at least four for each of the other three (for Bird and Stanton, this means including their non-Pixar films like Iron Giant or John Carter). Lasseter, Stanton, and Bird all reached the same point Docter did with sterling critical records. This pattern suggests that perhaps, after a few consecutive critical successes and box-office hits, the reins are loosened to the point where these directors get over-indulgent and experience creative failure for the first time. This predicts that Docter’s next film may be a regression. But until then, he’s not only the most financially successful director for the studio, but the most critically lauded as well. That’s like Metacritic giving best band of the decade honors to Spoon—a completely reliable artist who delivers time and time again, but doesn’t ever quite top the list in a given year.
This is undoubtedly a more subjective comparison---especially when my three favorite Pixar films were directed by Stanton (WALL-E), Bird (Ratatouille), and Lasseter (Toy Story 2). I can’t really put my finger on why this question of Docter’s underrated supremacy amongst elite company nagged at my brain like a Tripledent Gum ad. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that his work exhibits a rare thematic harmony.
Lasseter directed the films that launched Pixar into the public eye, and his personal passion for cars has undoubtedly sold mountains of merchandise for Disney—but his true talent appears to be as an executive shepherding other creators’ works through to theaters and helping make those ideas the best emotional connection devices they can be. He and Ed Catmull effectively saved Disney Animation Studios, the crown jewel of Walt Disney’s empire, from being shut down, turning it back into an juggernaut. But as a director, aside from Toy Story and the infamously rushed theatrical production of Toy Story 2, Lasseter’s work is thematically scattershot, from the "stand up for yourself, especially when you’re weird" message of A Bug’s Life, to "appreciate the pleasures of small-town life" in Cars, to whatever the hell it meant to have Larry The Cable Guy’s Mater as an accidental spy in Cars 2.
Stanton clearly thought that modern audiences would care about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ relatively obscure character John Carter of Mars as much as they did about his other notable creation, pop-culture staple Tarzan. That insistence led to a notorious quagmire, and now has him working on the anticipated but somewhat dubious Finding Nemo sequel Finding Dory. But his other films, including the staggeringly brilliant WALL-E (which still feels daring throughout the eerily silent and achingly romantic first act) and gargantuan success that is Finding Nemo, don’t have much in common, save for interest in how love is best expressed (WALL-E and Marlin essentially both follow the objects of their affection). For some, this diversity is a sign of fierce, boundless creativity. But there’s a value to placing a director’s works in a row and letting them play in concert with each other. That’s difficult to do with Lasseter and Stanton, and with Bird, it’s a problem because of the message critics keep noticing much to the chagrin of his fans.
The infinitesimal chorus of detractors around Brad Bird’s filmography is slowly gaining steam, especially after Tomorrowland echoed John Carter and The Lone Ranger as unwieldy debacles. And there’s a pervasive notion that Bird’s filmography has some Randian undertones: It’s hard to ignore the fact that Bird’s three films for Disney and Pixar all center on heroic exceptionalism (Mr. Incredible, Remy, Frank Walker) that can only be ruined by the presence and potentially villainous interference of undeserving "normal" people (Syndrome, Skinner/Anton Ego, everyone who doesn’t get a Tomorrowland pin).
But neither scattershot themes or unseemly sociological ideas show up in Docter’s films, which are all tied directly to a specific human emotion that isn’t love (the most ubiquitous emotional motivator). Monsters Inc. takes place in a world that uses human feelings literally harvested from children—the screams of terror, and later uproarious laughter—as an energy source. The ethics behind coaxing or forcibly taking those reactions forms the crux of the finale. Up is about processing grief, and how it’s never too late in life to actually learn how to live. The pinnacle of the film is Carl’s great sacrifice: literally letting go of the symbol of his grief for his wife—his soaring house, a quintessentially mesmerizing Pixar image—and watching it float down through the clouds after he saves Russell, Dug, and Kevin from Muntz. Inside Out is an even more internal investigation, anthropomorphizing emotions, and underlining again and again how they work together. Every person appears to have a different dominant emotion in their Headquarters, and each person’s team has to learn that the strongest, most integral memories are not defined by a single emotion. And Inside Out rectifies the one glaring absence of Docter’s previous films: a lack of central female characters. In fact, it takes a marvelous (and sadly rare) stance for a mainstream movie---that young girls don't always have to put on a smile and act happy.
This is where Docter having little involvement with Monsters University makes even more sense. It helps his critical average best the other three directors here—but it also doesn’t fit in with what the films he’s directed are trying to explore. University is at best a commentary on, as The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum put it, "social class and elitism"---and at worst a watered-down, animated Animal House. But neither of those readings align with Docter’s trio of films for Pixar.
Docter once said, "I don’t really like villains, they don’t seem like a reflection of reality. I don’t think anybody goes to sleep thinking, 'How can I do evil tomorrow?'" His three films don’t have traditional villains who mirror the protagonists, instead favoring to tease out deeper emotional responses from the ensemble over the course of a journey. In Monsters, Inc., the protagonists are monsters who scare children, turning the fantastical villains projected by the minds of children into heroes taking down a symbolically evil corporation after they learn to care for what was previously unknown. Muntz in Up is both a foolishly selfish explorer and the inspiration for Carl and Ellie’s entire relationship. And no single character in Inside Out could be labeled the antagonist: the entire point is that Riley’s emotions constantly overtake each other, and Joy learning to incorporate Sadness, ceding control to a co-lead as a character, is the most compelling arc of the film.
John Lasseter wants every Pixar (and now Disney Animation) film to make audiences deeply feel emotions and connect to characters, but Docter is the director who most humanizes this goal, who literally puts emotions front and center. I can’t say that any of his three films tops my list as a personal favorite. But I crunched the numbers, and I connected the dots---he just might be Pixar’s best.
